When CPUs are fast enough to make you won­der what to do with all that pro­cess­ing pow­er and hard­disks are large enough to make you won­der what to do with all that space, vir­tu­al PCs come to the res­cue. In the work sit­u­a­tion I'm try­ing to float a De­bian GNU/Lin­ux web­serv­er into an 8 CPU/8 GB Vir­tu­al Serv­er set­up, and for fun I'm play­ing around with qemu (http://www.qemu.org) on Lin­ux. To fill up my disk a lit­tle I was al­ready copy­ing every byte I could find onto it, and that in­clud­ed a pile of 3.5" flop­pies, and Win­dows 95 and OS/2 Warp in­stal­la­tion CDs. And from there it's not that hard to use an im­age of an MS-DOS 3.3 flop­py to in­stall a 1988 ver­sion of DOS on a vir­tu­al hard­disk us­ing qemu. Cur­rent­ly I've vhds to boot MS-DOS 3.3, MS-DOS 6.0, DR-DOS and Win­dows for Work­groups 3.11. Only OS/2 Warp didn't in­stall, prob­a­bly be­cause it has some prob­lems recog­nis­ing the CD-ROM dri­ve, so if I cre­ate in­stall flop­pies from the CD-ROM I can get that to work too. Also for Win­dows 95 the prob­lem is to load a dri­ver for the CD-ROM. Maybe I'll look into that lat­er. It's fun to run all the old stuff on a mod­ern sys­tem, and I've not even both­ered to in­stall the ac­celler­a­tor yet...

Gave OS/2 Warp 3 one more shot, but it doesn't get very far. It boots from the boot diskette, we can change that for diskette 1 and press en­ter, see the graph­ic in­stal­la­tion screen, Please wait... and then the screen stays black. With both diskette and CD op­tion.